Bussing it around the Kaliningrad region

31 July 2024 ~ See Kaliningrad Region by Coach

What is it about coach-based tours that have long been unappealing to me? And, if I faithfully eschewed them in the UK, why would I volunteer to go on one, here, in Kaliningrad? Well, I certainly had the means, the motive and the opportunity: at 15 quid I could just about afford it; I want to visit as many interesting places in the Kaliningrad region as I can; and we had a bus to go on. Nothing ventured, nothing gained!

“You’ll probably be the only man on the bus,” opined my wife. According to her, Russian women are predominantly more interested in matters of culture, art and history than Russian men. Ooh, that’s so sexist!

Well, she was wrong. There were three males on the coach, including myself, and one of them was the bus driver. I wonder what he was doing on this trip?

As with many events that are organised for me, I did not know where we were going or what we were going to see. I had been told that one stop on the way to Wherever It Was would be a cheese factory. I was rather looking forward to that. It’s a pity it never happened. However we did stop at two towns, two settlements, visited two museums and ate in an unconventional restaurant.

The job of the by-bus tour guide is very much a vocal one, and no sooner had the driver started the engine and put the bus in gear than the guide was giving us a dose of the verbals. She spoke too fast for me to catch everything she said, but I got the gist and where the gist escaped me, Olga brought me up to speed.

The first place where we came to rest was ‘The Big Meat Pie’. I don’t suppose for a moment that this is its real name, but I christened it that in the summer of 21, when we paused here for refreshments on route to Angel Park.

You would never have guessed it from the effigy of a big meat pie proudly rotating on top of a pole some forty feet above the carpark that this place is genuinely held in awe by lovers of big meat pies.

I am not sure whether anybody from our group partook of these exquisite delicacies, which look like giant turnovers, but I do know that there was a veritable stampede for the public incoveniences, which, located inside the premises, are one of those annoying places where to pee or to poo comes at a price.

Whenever I travel anywhere in the Eastern Hemisphere, I deliberately cut down on my fluid intake and was glad that I had today, because the toilet queue was rammed and the access gate unmanned, in other words it was coins or card. I can just imagine how happy folk would have been standing there with bursting bladders should a silly old fart of an Englishman jam the gate with the wrong coins or fail to use his card correctly.

There was another option: Outside in the carpark stood two of those little green Portaloos. I don’t like these, do you? No matter where you find them in the universe, more often than not they are stink-ridden, lack essential supplies for the paperwork and have, that is when they do have them, hand-gel sanitisers that have not seen gel since dinosaurs ruled the Earth. (Come back dinosaurs, we now have globalists!)

As in all the best sitcom films of the 1970s (Carry Ons and On The Buses etc), having peed or not, having stuffed a gigantic meat pie down our gullets or not, we all at a given moment filed back onto the bus and went roaring off in unison ~ destination, a town called Gusev.

A town called Gusev

Our bus drew to a halt in front of a large, ornate and, although I say so myself, impressive-looking Orthodox church domineering a vast piazza (no, that’s a pizza you are thinking of), which, before it underwent the modernisation of multicoloured block paving, substantial shrub and flower planters, street lamps of a retro nature and benches to watch the world go by on, would have been, I am sure, a large chunk of bland concrete on which the Soviets held parades and where its dignitaries and officials would have addressed the proletariat. If that was the sort of place it was, it was not that sort of place now.

Naturally, I took photos of what I could see, and naturally/unnaturally, depending upon your point of view, Olga asked for numerous photos to be taken of herself to go with her numerous selfies.

The Greg Wilcox bag, a fantasy military shoulder bag befittingly finished in olive drab, donated to me by my old friend Greg some time in the recent past, had been requisitioned for today’s trip. Hidden in it were sandwiches, sweets, fruit and a flask of coffee. This bag was slung over my shoulder as I stretched my legs in the square. Had you been nearby, over near the church, perhaps, or furtively lurking behind any one of several ornamental canons, you might have seen me extract from this bag a savoury roll and a large banana. A note to the uninitiated: Always take some snacks with you when embarking on a bus tour.

Stop over ~ Olga complaining that it was over too soon; that we had not seen enough ~ it was back on the bus: ‘chop, chop!’

Could it be Dobrovolsk?

After a brief interlude of highway driving, we left the beaten track. The Kaliningrad region (Kaliningrad Oblast) covers an area of approximately 15,000 square kilometres. In the past decade, a spanking new network of highways have made regional travel far more comfortable and infinitely more express, but the land is still criss-crossed with old Gerry roads, which are typically long, straight and narrow and lined on either side by sizeable trees.

It was by recourse to this web of smaller roads that we eventually ended up ~ and I choose the phrase ‘ended up’ with considered deliberation for its sense of where we felt we were ~ seemingly tucked away in a strangely quiescent nowhere hidden away in the back of beyond.

From the elevated vantage point of our bus windows ~ one of the advantages of travelling by modern bus is its height, since it allows you to see things which at eye level in an average-sized car would be at best half visible if not plainly indistinct ~ it appeared to us that we were driving into the centre of somewhere; a core area of something. But what exactly, I was not sure. It was a large space that would have been open was it not for the dominant presence of a prodigious, vented, cylindrical Soviet war monument, a tall obelisk arranged in three parts set in paved grounds surrounded by trees and shrubs.

To the right of this monument-occupied otherwise empty space stood a series of small prefab sheds, white with sloping roofs, which looked commercial in purpose. One, in fact, was a café, but whatever function the rest fulfilled all looked closed and vacant. The impermanent nature of these huts put me in mind of the sort of thing common to British seaside resorts back in the 1960s.

At the far end of this contrastive arrangement, a long, grey building presided, which had its origins in the German past. Although in part it contained the settlement’s shop, the spectacle of the Russian flag hoisted upon its front lent to the whole a distinctly municipal air.

The gravity and dignity which this building bestowed, counterpoised as it was with the row of little white huts, was not, however, salient. That accolade went to the war memorial, which, not in its size and scale but by virtue of its symbolic presence, dwarfed everything around it.    

These centralising elements, particularly the preponderous nature of the carefully choreographed cenotaph, whilst engaging all normal senses, were yet softened and enveloped, near and far the same, by an already verdant call from a mid-summer fast approaching. But what was decidedly unaffected either by hand or by nature, nature, that is to say, divined at its most natural, was the felt presence of an invisible entity, an invisible mass of some description, which, whilst no one in their right mind would want to meet it at night, was, I am glad to say, in the full refulgence of open daylight at the better end of almost unbearable.

I am trying to remember another such brooding dominion in my life where the push-me pull-me forces were so exacting. I know there have been some, even perhaps too many, but in this place, at that time, the ambivalent impulse to stay and go exerted an indescribable strength, so strong in its contradiction that either nothing I had experienced was quite so remarkable of its kind or the power that it wielded had wiped the slate of memory clean.

It was, therefore, with regret and relief and a kind of mystical thank you that, with our explorations for now concluded, we clambered back on board the bus and took off for another world, one hopefully less unfamiliar.

Another long trek through the old East Prussian countryside on roads narrow and lined with trees and for the most part empty of vehicles, brought us by and by to another public space of note in the centre of what I guesstimated was a small provincial town but was later told had city status.

Here our bus was met by the head honcho of the town’s museum, who preceded to deliver what I have no doubt was a most informative lecture on the history of the township and the biographies of its great and good. Unfortunately, however, two factors weighted against staying the course of his holding forth, which were that (a) my work-in-progress Russian permitted me to catch only so much of what it was he was saying, and (b) all of us from the coach were standing there in the midday sun slowly baking like a tray of potatoes. Thus, we sincerely trust, without incurring lasting offence, we sidled off to renew our acquaintance with an old and thoughtful friend. It was Mr Vladimir Lenin, who, standing high upon a plinth with an air of requited authority was, for all his self-assurance, looking rather upstaged, we thought, so we gave him the benefit of our attention and made his day by taking a snapshot.

At length, with the  man from the museum having reached the close of his not inconsiderable address, we rejoined our bus-prone group and allowed ourselves to be led away towards the town’s museum, passing on the way a group of local drunks who, observing our ordered formation on Russia’s Pioneers’ Day could not resist lampooning us, calling out with a snigger: “Are you pioneers?” They could not have made me feel more at home than had I been walking down Rushden High Street past the drunks that congregate outside the Rose and Crown. But we sallied forth away from them, like the cultured folk we were; away from their mid-day quips, away from their cool, their corrupting, their challenging, their callous and chilled cans of beer!

Krasnoznamensk and its museum

I like my museums like I like my antique auction houses: old buildings labyrinthed with rooms. Thus, Krasnoznamensk museum and I were destined to get on famously.

The exhibits contained therein are drawn from every-day life in the former East Prussian region, from and across the time when its occupants were German to and across the time when its occupants were Soviet. The displays range in type and scale from pottery fragments skilfully mounted between the frames of picture boards, a simple but effective technique which I must remember to try myself, to chunky household furniture, reconstructed Soviet kitchens and cottage-industry weaving machines. There is more than enough paraphernalia upturned into the present from its resting place within the past  to make obsolescence a thing of the future, including ~ and these are my favourites ~ hand-written letters, objects of ephemera, 19th century postcards, diaries and scrapbooks ~ intimate records of social history on which I place the highest value.

It was of no insurmountable consequence that I struggle in reading Russian and that the only words I know in German, other than Adolf Hitler, are ‘achtung’ and ‘schnell’, since help was on hand to translate the Soviet texts (you cheat, you!), and I found the German scrapbooks largely understandable. The newspaper cutting headlines and snipped extracts from magazines could often be worked out, especially when there were images present, and the published and personal photographs were all but perfectly self-explanatory.

One exhibit which particularly caught my time-obsessive eye was a torn and mottled document, on which was written in a hand exquisitely calligraphic and laid out with the exalted precision fabled of the Germanic race, an inventory of goods and chattels belonging to the writer’s home. Completed comprehensively, this illuminating historical record had been carefully rolled into a scroll and slotted for safe keeping inside a metal cannister. The lid had then been screwed on tight and the time capsule secreted away within the wall of the writer’s house, and there it had remained undisturbed for over a century. Great galloping goose bumps Batman!

Above: The time capsule dates to 1905. It was discovered on 8th July 2019 in the wall of a building in Youth Street, Dobrovolsk, Kaliningrad region.

Above: Condition of handwritten document preserved as a time capsule.

Above: Close-up of the handwritten paper found within the time capsule.

By the time we emerged from the museum, time itself had moved on and taken the piss artists ~ that delightful bunch of fellows who had so kindly serenaded us earlier ~ with it, leaving us with a bench on which we could sit in peace and enjoy our ice creams. There are times when time can be nothing but cruel, and at other times awfully kind.  

Once all of us pioneers had been assembled, we set off, guided-tour fashion, not in the direction of our charabanc but towards a piece of notable scenery.

The weather was made for meandering, and our walk, taken in low gear at deliberate tourist speed, took us down a steepish street with some lovely old houses on either side, the culmination of which was a landscape painter’s view of an archetypal red-brick church resting on a hill.

The pictorial composition with the church seen in the distance on top of its grassy eminence, bucolically framed by trees and meadows, its inverted mirror image reflecting in the river, made me reach for the brushes and easel that I have never had and oddly enough did not bring with me, and which, even if I had and did, I could not have used in a month of Sundays (this is where Victor is needed).  So, I reached for my camera instead.

We had come to a halt on a small knoll leading up to the sluice gates of a dam. From this position, and along the lower embankment, the water barely moving, pooling in the river’s widest point before making its rapid descent over the crest of the barrier, the lucky sightseeing tourist is treated to a first-class display of contrasting natural elements. In the foreground ~ suspension, energy, drama, a continual state of momentum; away and to the rear ~ unity and balance, a time-honoured pastoral tranquillity. Juxtaposition holds its own on the fringe of this chocolate box scene but is exceeded by a clever aesthetic in which we and Harmony have no doubt that she is the pedastalled Goddess and Contrast her submissive.

Having seen the church from afar, it was no other trick of nature that in the space of a short bus ride we were at its gates and then inside. The once Lutheran institution, which, as far as the cursory eye could see, had undergone no dramatic changes to its external heritage, had surrendered within, however, to the will of the reigning Orthodoxy.

Mercifully, in this instance, the exchange of religious affiliation had done nothing to damage the age-old idea of church as a place for retreat and sanctuary, and neither was it sufficient to have harmed and/or eroded all that we had been taught as children, that irrespective of denomination a church is always a church, a temple within whose hallowed walls everyone talks in whispers. With this particular church, even the least devout of Christians would be hard pushed to come away without confessing some admiration for the splendiferous Orthodox décor and a love of the heavenly scent lifted into the air from a multiplicity of burning wax candles.

Among the congregation of the church, there were these three Storks ~ you know the sort of thing: those prehistoric, long-legged birds native to these lands ~ who were conspicuous for their absence. They were standing not so far away looking like beaks on stilts above their ginormous nests, which they had built without permission on the tall tops of some telegraph poles, protruding from the yard of a deserted industrial building. “We never saw nuttin,” they seemed to say. “We were here, at home, all day, minding our business as usual.”

Above: Did you know that storks can be camera shy? She sat down as I was taking the photo.

It may be of interest for you to know that stopping off for a bite to eat had been included in the price of our tour. As that was something that never happened at the  ‘Big Meat Pie’, and by now it was half-past three, we were all getting rather peckish. “I should think you jolly well would be!” reasoned the storks. So we said our goodbyes to them, waved farewell to the church and shot off in the bus.

Seeing the Kaliningrad region by coach

On our way to somewhere else (Nemanskoye), it was made known to us that the restaurant awaiting our patronage was located in the same settlement where the last venue of the day, a museum to local and Soviet history, was our current destination. The master plan was simple: split the company into two groups; one group to the museum; the other off to the restaurant. We were in the restaurant group and that was fine with me.

By and by the bus came to rest on a piece of rough ground. I presumed that the large German building to the left of us with a giant mural on its gable end had to be our restaurant, but I couldn’t have been more wrong than had I won first prize in the Getting It Wrong on A Bus Tour show.  

In my defence, however, there was nothing in the near vicinity remotely restaurant-like. Before us stood some old brick barns, worth their weight in golden history, and behind us a red-brick building with a broad and sweeping roof, which, judging by its maintained appearance and the tended garden in which it stood, was, I inferred, the museum. Give the man a coconut! This time I got it right!

Above: Vicarage when the region was German. Now a museum dedicated to Soviet social history.

Unlike the other venues we had stopped at on our journey, this hamlet had no centre. All it appeared to consist of was half-a-dozen humble cottages on either side of the road. Where on earth in a place like this could the restaurant be? I wondered.

I was still wondering this when the game of follow my leader began. We were heading in the direction of a typical row of East Prussian cottages, brief terraces under one roof often topped with asbestos; one-storey dwellings which logically could have been two, as almost all German houses built to this spec scattered across the region have room enough in their attics in which to hide a doodlebug.

We were walking across the opening to a yard which, with its sloping sheds, buckling barns, old wagons, oil drums, chickens and a cat, had ‘rural smallholding’ written all over it. What it did not have, however, was a sign saying ‘restaurant’. Nevertheless, before long, we would be stooping under a home-made porch, frightening off a gaggle of children who were hanging around outside and making the cat go ‘meow’. I replied in kind, of course; forever the well-behaved Englishman.

Above: View from inside the restaurant into the back yard.

Normally, a provincial building of this type would be segregated into three or four parts, that is to say three or four homes, with the front doors lined up in series along the longer edge, which is often, but not always, the side that borders the road. Bucking the trend, however, this building ~ it was our restaurant ~ was accessed through the gable-end wall. I imagine that at some time in its history the intersecting walls had been removed in order to transform the building into what it had become, one long rectangular room.

It was welcomingly cool within, if not a trifle chilly and definitely feeling and smelling unused, in the sense of quaintly damp. Several laid tables with four seats apiece were arranged in sequence along one side, the side with the windows that bordered the road.

The decoration was rather spartan and most of all it did not fit. And yet, its being so oddly mis-matched made it a place like nobody else’s, and a memorable one at that. The restaurant had a bar where similar things were going on. At first it was alluring, but faster than immediately, you could say quite at once, it lost its appeal and attraction, like a sequestered piece of ground might do if thought at first to be a garden when in fact it was a graveyard. Every bottle on every shelf and attached to every optic was as empty and forlorn as a liberal comedian’s repertoire and looked as if they had been that way before recollection had been invented. The bar did have Jim Beam, however! But, of course, it didn’t.

It was socially unacceptable, so many empty bottles, a little like reading the local obituaries first thing over breakfast to see which of your remaining friends had died the night before. With a heartfelt sigh, I turned away. I might even have said a short prayer. And if I didn’t, I should have done.

Above: Is there something a bit Old West going on here? The drinks had certainly gone west.

Ordinarily, I am not a fatty fry-ups man, but today I was so hungry ~ the proverbial hungry traveller ~ that I could have seen off a plate of bacon and eggs, no problem ~ minus the bacon, of course. However, the menu had but one thing on it, of which we had been forewarned but it did not follow had come forearmed.

Today’s special was billed as a traditional Lithuanian delicacy. It was normally stuffed with meat, but a vegetarian option, in which the animal parts had been replaced by potatoes, was about to make its debut. So, let it not be said that I had not been adequately catered for!

When the dish was slapped on our table, however, I greeted it with deep suspicion bordering on alarm. Whatever was it supposed to be? It embodied the shape of a Cornish pasty but had such a pallor of sickly white that the last to make its acquaintance must surely have been Count Dracula. It glistened from head to toe with something that looked like nitro-glycerine and was crowned with a caking of crispy brown stuff, which, I rightly or wrongly presumed, was a pinch or a sprinkling of bacon burnt. Vegetarian or not, it had an altogether living look, like an alien cheaply made for an early episode of Dr Who before Big Budget turned it woke.

I nibbled just a bit, just to be polite, but could not disguise my aversion. At the very least it reminded me of those rubbery, stodgy, suet dumplings routinely and far too regularly offered up as food at school (which you had better eat or else!) and which dropped from gullet to guts like British Navy depth charges onto states of panic in the turmoil below.

Politely saying, “I think I will pass”, was not on the menu either. There it sat, this delicious delicacy, as bold as bollocks upon my plate. It could only be a matter of time before the guards discovered that Appetite was missing and would drag me away for interrogation: “You don’t like it? Why? What is wrong with you? Why don’t you like it?” Every question they fired at me sounded like an accusation.

In fairness, and unfairness, we vegetarians are used to this. I myself have 48 years of used to. But it certainly is not everyday, especially in these enlightened times, that turning down a recipe on the grounds that meat might be lurking in it attracts such grave astonishment from an audience so astounded. Every person within the room, that is every person without exception, was gawping in my direction, some with their forks comically frozen midway to their mouths, as if they could not believe their eyes and ears. How could one be so rude to that lovely hunchbacked anaemic thing crouching on our plates.

I lowered my eyes to my own plate; it was right and proper to do so; such indefensible shame. The source of my torment grinned back at me in a state of half-mutilation: “Eat me! Eat Me!” it goaded. Where was Alice’s Wonderland when you needed to shrink in it most!?

“These people,” I thought to myself indignantly. “Why do these people complain?” (Although no one was complaining.) After all, whatever it was we were eating, or not as the case may be, had come from Lithuania. It was not as if I was turning down honest-to-goodness buckwheat or good old kapoosta pie; those I can eat ‘till the bears come home! I simply, but categorically, had lost myself in the critical fog of what, by all accounts, should have been that Lithuanian moment.

Glad I came to the restaurant, gladder when I came out, all I had left was the cat for a friend. It followed me to the roadside and saw me off with a last  ‘meow’, saying “No one can blame you, Englishman. Given the opportunity, I wouldn’t have eaten it either.”

“Must be a Russian cat,” I thought.

Banquet over, I tightened my belt and put on my museum hat. It was by far the better thing to do. If museums be the food of love, move on!

Above: Museum as seen from the grass area on the opposite side of the road.

Nemanskoye Museum

The renovated but not spoilt building now occupied by Nemanskoye museum is devoted generally to an exposition of Soviet cultural history and specifically to life in the village of Nemanskoye from the end of the Great Patriotic War to the fall of the U.S.S.R.. In German times the house had doubled as the home of the vicar and village hall, a place where meetings could be held to air and discuss community matters.

Now, as a museum, the connection between the past and the present could not be more complete. It is as sharp as a contactless card: Cross the threshold it registers. The connection is a personal one. The museum so thoughtfully tended with personal love and care wires you into its memory banks quicker than you can say ‘Life was harder in those times but somehow remarkably more in touch with the core of who and what we are’.

The Soviet story of life in the settlement and the lessons learnt in humanity passed down through the decades from the vicarage that was, and the influence they brought to bear in creating this private museum, whether predetermined or acausal, have a humanist continuity that is worth revisiting at a later date and thus in a later post. Although my sound advice to the reader is go and see for yourself.

Epilogue

At the outset of this post, I confided in you my reservations about sailing off on coach trips. Never a beckoning finger or a tune that would have me dancing to it have persuaded me to think otherwise, but had I stuck to my prejudiced guns and been led by nothing but precedent, what, odds I wonder, would Ladbrokes have given me of my ever encountering the historic delights I experienced thanks to this tour?

True one or two of the stops we made had been little more than flying visits, such is the nature of coach tours, but they made an impressionable mark, so that should the compulsion assert itself, which I am fairly certain it will, then these introductions may pave the way for further exploration.

Thus, the moral of this story is, in case you have not deduced it yet, that, as with many things in life, and guided tours are no exception, give it the benefit of the doubt: ‘don’t knock it till you’ve tried it!’

Copyright © 2018-2024 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.